Waiting for God · Season 1
What did he die of?
Well, he just sort of stopped.
The usual. Terminal boredom. Another green bottle falls off the wall.
I thought you knew.
Well, they hardly shout these things from the rooftops, you know. You never see a hearse in here in daylight. Slip in under the cover of darkness like body snatchers. The sun comes up and everyone’s trying to avoid looking at the empty bowl of Frosties on the breakfast table.
Do you know what faith is, Jane? Faith is what helps you make the quantum leap between the believable to the totally bloody ridiculous.
I used to come down here during the war. I used the watch the air battles, the dogfights, out there. Our boys and their boys weaving about on a lovely summer’s day, putting on such a show. If one of the Hun went down, the whole beach would cheer. If one of our boys was hit, even the wind would stop blowing. Time froze until the lad either parachuted to safety and your heart would leap, or he plunged into the sea and you all died with him. Nineteen or twenty years of some dear mother’s adoration, loving care, just switched off. Doused. It’s why I never had children. Couldn’t face losing them. It’s why I never had much at all.
If you think life is one long bath in acid, why don’t you pull the plug?
Suicide?
Mercy killing, in your case.
No. Too many people to get even with, and the best way to do that is outlive them.
Tom, should you be leaving like this?
No.
Well, maybe you shouldn’t.
Of course I shouldn’t.
Well then, why are you?
Oh God, woman, don’t you ever listen to your own lectures? To stay alive, one must be bloody-minded and contrary at all times!
Well, maybe I was just theorising.
Pain is experience, Tom!
Experience for what?
For its own sake. Now, if we were to shoot ourselves, there would be a moment when we would know what it felt like to be shot. We would be more complete human beings. Metaphysically, that is. Physically, of course, we’d be slightly less complete human beings.
For you, they’d need a 70-Dead Club.
What a terrible idea.
Money back if you conk out before take-off… You and I ought to go to some of these resorts. Parade naked up and down the beach with placards saying “Hello, Young People. We Are Your Future.”
Stop this quaintly dotty non-sequential stuff, this phony senility. It won’t wash with me. You’re quite capable of logical reasoning so just stop trying to fill the role of the charmingly barmy old codger. You want to watch out – they’ll start believing it’s the real you. They’ll start patting you on the knee and talking slowly and carefully. And then you’ll start nodding and smiling and then they’ll be saying you’re not long for this world, you’ve had a good run for your money and you won’t want to disappoint them so you’ll have a stroke just to be obliging. And then when you’re paralysed and dribbling, they’ll start talking at you even louder and because you can’t reply they’ll think you can’t think or hear either so they won’t even leave the room when they discuss how they’ll redecorate it after you’ve gone. And hasn’t anyone asked the quack how much longer you’ll be and aren’t you being a bit selfish hanging on for yet another winter and don’t you realise there’s another generation knocking at the door?
When you talk to God, why do you look into the treetops? Is God a squirrel?
No, he’s not a squirrel. You mustn’t blaspheme.
I just don’t believe in God.
He’s probably got fairly severe reservations about you, too.
Good heavens, someone die? Of course not. We’d have shared out the extra cornflakes at breakfast.
The place is turning into a geriatric Club Med!
Oh, well, they all seem a lot happier.
But is that the object of the exercise here, Jane? Is it?
Isn’t it?
No! It isn’t! It isn’t! It isn’t! Well, I mean it is, of course it is.
I think our beloved leader, Harvey Pea-brain Baines, the athlete’s foot from the black lagoon, the soot from the flue of life, he who should be scraped from one’s shoe…
Get to the point!
Well, I think Baines is up to something.
He probably wants to curb your use of extravagant metaphor.
You’re a pensioner. You’re supposed to be dead from the neck up and extra dead from the waist down.
A bargain lights a primeval fire in Marion’s loins. Apparently, she can only achieve orgasm during the Harrod’s sales.
It’s my holy mission in life, to blow raspberries at other holy missions.
But has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?
Why should it? It never occurs to any of them. Except possibly the Church of England.
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